Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., the Longtime Owner of The New Yorker and Chairman of Condé Nast, Has Died at Eighty-Nine

Newhouse ran the business of The New Yorker and Condé Nast with a sense of passion, creativity, and daring for almost forty years.

Photograph by Ron Galella, Ltd. / WireImage / Getty

Forty-eight years ago, Gardner Botsford, a longtime editor at this
magazine, wrote an obituary and appreciation in these pages of his
stepfather, Raoul Fleischmann, a wealthy yeast tycoon, who had
underwritten an itinerant newspaperman named Harold Ross to begin a
weekly magazine in Jazz Age Manhattan. Together, in February, 1925, they
published the first issue of The New Yorker. Botsford drew an
extended, witty contrast between the posh publisher (“he never drove
anywhere; he motored”) and the gap-toothed editor, who played poker with
his cronies till all hours and looked as if he cut his upstanding hair
with a pair of hedge shears. But this was the crucial passage:

Publishing is, or should be, a quiet operation, and it was
Fleischmann’s talent to make it almost inaudible. From the first, he was
convinced that the separation of the editorial and the business sides of
the magazine had to be complete: no disingenuous management requests for
editorial mention of an important advertiser’s product, no publisher’s
protests against an article that might offend a prominent client—no
pressures, overt or hidden. In fact, by his own wish, he never saw the
editorial content of any issue until it had been printed and bound—a
demonstration of phenomenal self-restraint—and he never commented to
his editors on what they had turned out.

Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr., who has died at the age of eighty-nine, bought The
New Yorker from the Fleischmann family thirty-two years ago in the name
of Advance Publications, his family’s media company. He differed from
the Fleischmanns in many respects—for one thing, the Newhouse holdings
extend far beyond yeast—but he shared their approach to The New
Yorker. Si Newhouse almost never came around our offices—not the old
ones in midtown, on Bryant Park and in Times Square, and not the new offices, at
One World Trade Center. He stuck to his own uncluttered lair, where he
ran the business of Condé Nast with a sense of passion, creativity,
mystery, and daring for almost forty years.

Si Newhouse kept in close touch, of course, with the magazine’s editor
and the publisher, but his formal distance was not a function of his
reticent personality. It was, as it had been with Raoul Fleischmann, a
kind of ideology. The New Yorker was to be in the hands of its
editors, writers, and artists. He owned the operation, paying the salaries and the rent, but he did not touch the magazine’s pages; he never
suggested a story, he never revealed his political inclinations, he
never gave advance instructions or retrospective criticism of an issue. When he
mentioned that he had liked something in The New Yorker, he did so
shyly, reluctantly, as if he were overstepping.

As the magazine’s owner, Si reserved the right to hire and fire
the editor, but the distance he otherwise kept was a rarity in modern
American journalism, just as Fleischmann’s had been. Si’s way of
communicating even something as essential as his desire to preserve the
magazine’s editorial independence was often oblique. When I succeeded
Tina Brown as the editor, in July, 1998, my only experience in editing a
publication was a stint at my high-school newspaper. Some months later,
when faced with an investigative article that made many bold assertions
based on deep and prolonged reporting, I wondered if I should give Si a
full rundown of the piece and its preparation. I recalled, from my years
as a reporter at the Washington Post, that Ben Bradlee, the editor, had
an arrangement with the paper’s owner, Katharine Graham, called the
“no-surprises rule.” That is, if he was planning to publish something of
unusual investigative moment or daring, he alerted Graham, because
she, after all, would be paying the legal bills. If I was going to burn
down the house, it seemed fair to call the one who held the deed. So I
called Si.

It is fair to say that Si Newhouse was not a big talker on any occasion,
but here he was especially reserved. I responded by rattling on about
the strength of the piece, the efforts exerted by the writer and the
fact checkers, the care lavished on the text by the editors and our
lawyer. Finally, I concluded this bumbling soliloquy with “And so I
think we should be O.K.”

A prolonged silence ensued at the end of the line. At last Si said,
“That sounds very interesting. I look forward to reading it.” The message seemed clear: it’s for you to decide. Although there were many reasons one might have called him in the years
ahead—investigative pieces, political opinion pieces, sure-to-be
controversial covers, and, yes, mistakes—there would be no more calls.
The print magazine closes Friday evenings, and sometimes we would send
proofs of a few articles to Si late Friday, when they’d already gone to
the printer. But nearly always he read the contents of The New Yorker when the readers of The New Yorker did. In a world of meddlesome
owners, worrywart owners, mercenary owners, owners who use their
publications as instruments of political influence or social
positioning, he bought The New Yorker because he enjoyed what it had been and he wanted it to go on being true to itself, even as it
modernized and reached readers in new ways­­.

Si Newhouse, who began work at Condé Nast in 1961 and became its
chairman in 1975, had two particularly important mentors. The first was
his father, who so loved the world of newspapers that, in 1939, he
turned down a chance to buy the New York Yankees and set out to buy
newspapers in Syracuse instead. The second was Alexander Liberman, a
courtly émigré from Russia by way of Paris, who was both an
accomplished artist and a creator of magazines, first as the art
director of Vogue and then as the editorial director of Condé Nast. Si
took his direction in business from his up-before-dawn, detail-driven
father and learned the art of magazine-making from Liberman. He was not
averse to risk; he kept a constant eye out for new projects
and acquisitions. They tended to pay off. As the head of Condé Nast and,
from 1980 to 1998, of the Random House group, he wielded tremendous
influence in the media world. As a book publisher, he did not hesitate
to suggest a big-ticket author or a subject that captured his interest,
like the Rockefellers. Yet he hardly followed the pattern of the
self-promoting modern tycoon, and seldom gave interviews to the press.

The initial crisis he faced as the owner of The New Yorker was a
succession drama. William Shawn, a man as reserved, in his way, as Si
Newhouse, had been its editor since 1952, and had long since gained a
reputation for editorial brilliance and uncommon sympathy with his
writers and artists, but he was nearing the end of his eighth decade, and
there was no plan for the magazine’s editorial future. Shawn thought that it
was his prerogative to choose a successor, or, indeed, not to; Si
thought otherwise and, in 1987, replaced him with Robert Gottlieb, who
had won a sterling reputation as the head of two publishing houses,
Simon & Schuster and then Alfred A. Knopf. The move unnerved and angered
many staff members, both because of their deep loyalty to Shawn and
because they worried that The New Yorker would stray from the course
set by Ross and Shawn. But Si did not acquire the magazine to turn it
into another one; his abiding concern was maintaining its health and sense of mission.

Like their father before them, Si and his brother Donald, who is still
active in the family’s media business, were at their desks sometime
around 5 A.M. At Condé Nast, Si took advantage of the longer horizons of
a private company to make editorial investments that would prove
themselves over the years, not quarter to quarter. But the ledger sheet
was not his favorite reading material. Si and his devoted wife, Victoria, an
architectural historian, loved books; they were avid art collectors,
travellers, and theatre- and operagoers. Si was especially
steeped in the movies, high and low. He loved gangster pictures,
romantic comedies, film noir, silent comedies, the avant-garde. Every
November, he celebrated his birthday with a screening for his family and
friends: “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Gun Crazy, “The Earrings of Madame de
. . .” His reticence disappeared in the dark. In movie theatres, he laughed,
and sometimes cried, without restraint.

Si was a shrewd businessman who cared deeply about what his businesses
were ushering into the world. Each title at Condé Nast meant something
to him, excited some passion of his, some aspect of his personality:
architecture, literature, food, fashion, art, Hollywood. When he got to
start a new title, he was thrilled, and when circumstances dictated that
a magazine’s time had reached an end, or when a launch turned out to be a
misfire, he suffered. The New Yorker was different from the other
magazines he had husbanded—it had, and still has, its own set of
standards, methods, and even eccentricities—and he would have had it no
other way. When the magazine lost money for a while, he was patient;
when it built upon its strengths, he was pleased. He was not unduly
preoccupied with short-term setbacks and gains. (Raoul Fleischmann did
not quite have this gift for equanimity.) The quiet sustenance he
provided was unwavering, and just one of the many sources of support he
provided to the people who worked here.

A. J. Liebling, who was the press critic for this publication in the
nineteen-forties and fifties, wrote that the pattern of a reporter’s
life “is like the plot of ‘Black Beauty.’ Sometimes he finds a kind
master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form
of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner
who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato
peelings.” Where The New Yorker was concerned, Si Newhouse was
generous in more than material ways. His forbearances were as thoughtful
as his actions, and he justly took pride in what had often seemed a
long-odds scenario: a comic weekly from the Jazz Age, which has evolved
and deepened in many ways, is now braving its tenth decade. We honor the
kindness, the vision, and the memory of a man who did so much to help
make that possible.

This article appears in the print edition of the October 16, 2017, issue, with the headline “S. I. Newhouse, Jr.”